You want to see media bias in action? Okay — look at the conservative media reaction to the firing of Shirley Sherrod.

Sherrod is the former U.S. Department of Agriculture employee fired for supposed anti-white racism. On July 19, Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com website posted a short video clip from a speech Sherrod had delivered to an NAACP gathering in March.

In the clip, Sherrod confessed to having deliberately declined on racial grounds to help a white farmer faced with a foreclosure on his farm. She was immediately terminated by the USDA and condemned by the national NAACP.

But a second look at the tape made it obvious that the tape had been severely edited, abruptly cut short. Within hours it emerged that the story on the tape was exactly the opposite of the story Breitbart had wanted to tell.

Conservative pundits justify fraudulent journalism on the grounds that all is fair in war.
Sherrod was telling a story about overcoming her own racial antagonisms. She had repented, had helped the white farmer, had saved the farm, had formed a friendship with the farmer and his family that lasts to this day. Besides which: The episode in question dates back to 1986, long before Sherrod ever went to work at the USDA.

By the morning of July 20 the Sherrod-as-racist narrative had collapsed.

What is most fascinating about that second day, however, was the conservative reaction to the collapse. At midday on the 20th, Rush Limbaugh was still praising Breitbart: "I know that Andrew Breitbart's done great work getting this video of Ms. Sherrod at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and her supposed racism and so forth saying she's not gonna help a white farmer."

By the evening of the 20th, however, conservatives were backing away, acknowledging that an innocent women had been defamed.

Here's Glenn Beck. (link in original article)

Here's Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.(link in original article)

Here's Instapundit.(link in original article)

Here's the popular Anchoress blog at First Things(link in original article).

Even the racially incendiary Eric Erickson tweeted his disquiet, and then posted this on his RedState website.

But you’ll never guess who emerged as the villains of the story in this second-day conservative react. Not Andrew Breitbart, the distributor of a falsified tape. No, the villains were President Obama and the NAACP for believing Breitbart's falsehood.

Breitbart went almost universally unmentioned. Erickson even justified Breitbart's falsehood as a tragic but necessary and justifiable measure of conservative self-defense:

This is what we have become in politics because of the unrepentant race-baiting on the Left. It has become a tit for tat war of retribution. ... That war has casualties on both sides. Ms. Sherrod is the latest. It is not fair. But that’s how the Left plays and the Right must fight on offense or not fight at all. It disgusts me to have to say it, but that is so very sadly where we are."

Breitbart himself had this to say about those who would manipulate the public record for ideological purposes:

Journalists love whistle-blowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them. Journalists love transparency. As long as they’re not the ones being exposed. No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means .... They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called "truth seekers" are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down.

But that of course was not a confession or apology. Breitbart continues to defend his own "ends justify the means" bending of the truth, as you can see here in this July 20 interview with CNN’s John King.

No, Breitbart’s indignant words on the 20th were aimed at another snippets-out-of-context scandal for the Right: the Daily Caller’s publication of quotations from the JournoList archive in which liberal activists and bloggers jeered George Stephanopoulos for asking Barack Obama about Jeremiah Wright.

Speaking on a liberal list serve, journalists had wondered how the Wright story could be stifled. One obnoxious young participant had even suggested that the story could be killed by hurling accusations of racism at conservative figures like Fred Barnes and Karl Rove. Conservatives exploded: The media were colluding to quash bad news about their beloved Obama! Only of course the Wright story was not quashed — unlike the story of Breitbart's role in Sherrod's firing, which has been, at least among conservatives.

On the phone on the evening of July 20, a friend asked me: "Can Breitbart possibly survive?" I could only laugh incredulously. I answered: "Of course he'll survive, and undamaged. The incident won't matter at all."

There will be no apology or statement of regret for distributing a doctored tape to defame and destroy someone. There will be not even a flutter of interest among conservatives in discussing Breitbart’s role. By the morning of July 21, the Fox & Friends morning show could devote a segment to the Sherrod case without so much as a mention of Breitbart’s role. The central fact of the Sherrod story has been edited out of the conservative narrative, just as it was edited out of the tape itself.

When people talk of the "closing of the conservative mind" this is what they mean: not that conservatives are more narrow-minded than other people — everybody can be narrow minded — but that conservatives have a unique capacity to ignore unwelcome fact.

When Dan Rather succumbed to the forged Bush war record hoax in 2004, CBS forced him into retirement. Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather, but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him.

Instead, conservatives are consumed with a new snippets-out-of-context uproar, the latest round of JournoList quotations. Here at last is proof of the cynical machinations of the hated liberal media! As to the cynical machinations of conservative media — well, as the saying goes, the fish never notices the water through which it swims.

road kill

07-21-2010, 02:35 PM

Well.......once again Obama reacted without knowing the facts!!
And it's Fox news fault??

Your silly!!

Nuttin' new.

rk

M&K's Retrievers

07-21-2010, 02:58 PM

Well.......once again Obama reacted without knowing the facts!!
And it's Fox news fault??

Your silly!!

Nuttin' new.

rk

Reminds me of the cop and the prof.

Gerry Clinchy

07-21-2010, 03:25 PM

Buzz, I would not absolve Breitbart of wrong-doing, but it was equally as wrong of NAACP and Obama to not get their facts straight before jumping to conclusions.

If Obama and his staff were to react this way in their international relations for our country, they could make a big mess real quick. I expect better of the President of the US, especially one who is supposed to be highly intelligent and pragmatic.

gman0046

07-21-2010, 03:30 PM

It's not Obongo's first time either. Remember when he said the white policeman acted stupidly for arresting the black and the ridiculous beer party? A president to be proud of.

Hew

07-21-2010, 03:53 PM

I Know Conservatives No Longer Like David Frum

And this is a big part of the reason. He calls them as he sees them...

LMAO. So if I dig up all his previous blather about liberals and the Clintons you're going to agree with Frum? He call them as he see them, right? :rolleyes:

Eric Johnson

07-21-2010, 03:55 PM

The story is ...

... that Breitbart had knowlege of the tape back in March. A DVD was sent to him then but the contents were munged and he did nothing further with it.

[fast forward]

The NAACP spent a rather large amount of time taking action against the "racist TEA party" whereas there's not been a single shred of evidence that the TEA Party embraces racist elements. In fact, Breitbart has a standing offer of $100,000 to the person who can demonstrate a racist act at a TEA Party event.

Then he remembered this clip and wrote the guy and asked for another copy. When he saw it, he was struck by the audience response to her statements far more than the statements themselves. There were a whole audience of NAACP members cheering and egging on the speaker in a blantantly racist display. That is the reason he made the clip available...to show the hypocracy of the NAACP.

Eric

PS: It's only a fluke that the President and the NAACP then stepped on their collective schwanzes.

pat addis

07-21-2010, 03:56 PM

And this is a big part of the reason. He calls them as he sees them...